Outcome-Based Education

Outcome-based education (OBE) is a student-centered, results-oriented instructional system that focuses on those processes by which each student in the school is able to demonstrate what he or she knows and is able to do to a predetermined level of attainment. In its focus on clearly specified student outcomes as the curriculum, OBE differs from traditional education that emphasized school inputs, such as Carnegie units, known as “seat time,” as indicators of student achievement. The original conceptual framework for OBE was based in the Benjamin S. Bloom's Learning for Mastery model and in the theoretical work of [Page 624]John B. Carroll, which asserted that as many as 95% of students could achieve mastery of a topic or a task if differential instruction that maximized the ...